The present invention relates to the field of information technology, including, more particularly, to systems and techniques for cloud computing.
Enterprise cloud computing is becoming inevitable. Market analysts have pointed out that more than 15 percent of total information technology (IT) spending worldwide will be on a public cloud by 2016. And, most enterprise public cloud computing infrastructures will have some kind of hybrid flavor with some private computing environments. While the technology for cloud orchestration for computing and storage resources is advancing rapidly, the technology that is required to support enterprise data transport, synchronization, backup, and security protection in the hybrid cloud is lacking behind. Common challenges and requirements facing enterprises are listed below.
Cloud servers in a public cloud are dynamically generated and deleted on demand. The data storage in a cloud can be a central storage or a local storage on each cloud server. For a secure data transfer system to work with the central storage or local storage it is desirable that the system accommodates dynamically generated components of the cloud elastic computing infrastructure.
Data with frequent revisions may need to be transferred to a public cloud for processing by cloud servers, as part of the total automation. Due to the limited network bandwidth on the Internet, it is desirable to transfer only the delta between versions instead of transporting the entire volume. A data synchronization scheme is therefore desirable for a secure data transfer system. This synchronization scheme should accommodate the requirements for elastic computing.
New data can be generated in the cloud that needs to be backed up or feed forward to another remote system frequently for the next step in an intelligent analysis (for example, big data analysis). An automatic backup function is also a desirable feature for a secure data transfer system. The backup system should integrate with synchronization capability for data efficiency. Likewise, this backup function should accommodate the requirement for elastic computing as well.
Current cloud technology fails to address the above requirements—especially in the context of supporting an enterprise hybrid computing application. There is a need to provide improved systems and techniques to facilitate secure data transfer and access in enterprise cloud computing environments.